Will the new deep dungeon be designed for solo play?

[Ralphe2449]

I havent followed the subject of the deep dungeon they are creating, but do we know if they have decided to design it with solo play in mind?

PotD might be soloable but not only does it require a long grind with hopes of getting lucky, it often feels terrible solo because the content was never designed with solo players in mind, going on an unlucky rng floor or instant death auto attack is death while for a group it isnt. Let's not even mention the fact melee have to try break npc auto attacks with spinning to even survive...
Havent checked out HoH because from what i understood it is quite similar.

One thing WoW did better in terms of deep dungeon was their torghast dungeon which was designed to be done solo rather than group, groups could do it but solo players could do it as well so it was never about getting lucky or having really bad floors, you could always find a way to beat the floor even slowly.

Do we know if the new deep dungeon gonna be designed with solo players in mind or going to be the same as PotD?

[Rongway]

The biggest failing of the Palace of the Dead challenge floors in terms of solo play is really just how the servers handle a network connection loss. I don't really see too many people complaining about the actual difficulty of it, to be honest, as the people who are doing it are doing it for the challenge anyway. And so before even considering content design, the issue that really needs to be addressed to make roguelite content solo friendly first is the disconnect behavior: when all players in an instance disconnect, the server should keep the instance open for them at least as long as the idle timeout of the last person (10 minutes) so that they have an opportunity to reconnect. If necessary, leave the character active while the player is disconnected so that patrolling monsters can still walk by and kill them; but at least then it wouldn't just be a technical wipe purely on the basis of connection issues.

[Risvertasashi]

Judging from past designs, there will likely be a solo challenge for hardcore players, but the general expectation will be for people to run it with a group which will give the most reliable and fastest clears of lower floors and the best shot at clearing the deepest floors.

However, we also have the variant dungeon now which brings some new elements to the mix - including HP scaling. It takes almost exactly the same time to clear solo as with 4 people (assuming no deaths, etc - if there are deaths, 4 people is slower). It's certainly not impossible that SE might decide to change up their deep dungeon template, and perhaps take some elements from variant or otherwise adjust for perceived weaknesses.

Ultimately we won't know unless/until they say so. But also -even when SE does eventually reveal more - be careful taking their words at face value - Island Sanctuary was supposed to be casual and relaxing (and one supposes it can be if you ignore objectives), but ended up being surprisingly closer to the hardcore spectrum with the need for detailed calculation, min/maxing, and hard grinding to advance at a reasonable pace.

[CKNovel]

The biggest failing of the Palace of the Dead challenge floors in terms of solo play is really just how the servers handle a network connection loss. I don't really see too many people complaining about the actual difficulty of it, to be honest, as the people who are doing it are doing it for the challenge anyway. And so before even considering content design, the issue that really needs to be addressed to make roguelite content solo friendly first is the disconnect behavior: when all players in an instance disconnect, the server should keep the instance open for them at least as long as the idle timeout of the last person (10 minutes) so that they have an opportunity to reconnect. If necessary, leave the character active while the player is disconnected so that patrolling monsters can still walk by and kill them; but at least then it wouldn't just be a technical wipe purely on the basis of connection issues.

You should be able to continue your run from the last checkpoint on failure.
I always wanted to try solo run, but running hours and hours of trash just to get to the interesting part isn't fun.

And getting your 8h run ruined by a random disconnection, it simply sucks.
Or at least put a hard checkpoint every 50 floors.

[Rithy255]

I really hope for "variant actions" in deep dungeons I found my biggest issue was in group play in POD/HOH was that enemies really don't hit hard on the early floors, because it's designed to accommodate 4 DPS, This also would mean lets say you got "4 healers" because that does happen, you could at least give yourself a DOT action or a massive DPS action so that bringing in a healer isn't bad

These are generally for the early floors, ones that I've grinded while levelling DPS jobs mainly, for the "solo" or floors that I haven't been on (the later ones) I'm pretty unsure, I don't think actions like that would break anything but correct me if I'm wrong.

Personally I found deep dungeons as a concept very cool but grinding them and stuff for levelling really left a bad feeling for "deep dungeon content" So I'm hoping they make it "more fun" for me personally.

I guess also adding stuff like "variant actions" would make most if not all jobs viable to solo on which I think is a good thing.

[Videra]

Considering that they already are designed with solo play in mind, yes. The main flaw POTD and HoH has is that they handle disconnects in a really shit way, example:

My friend on Mateus lost their BLM solo run on floor 200 because of the recent DDOS attacks, and by extension, lost their shot at genuinely earning The Necromancer without playing one of the less skillful classes.

[Teno]

I dropped Potd due to the amount of disconnects I had back then. More floors, longer clear time = more chance for a DC overall, especially since I was on an unstable 4G.

I also lost a run with all stars aligned (2x Odin, 3x serenity, 2x safety) on HoH floor 98 to a shabti (with their super fast cast time) despite constantly circling around it because I knew lag was around the corner.

I now have a better connection and am eager to try out the new mode solo but I seriously hope they work on disconnects. Most frustrating experience in this game.